I love Arc Raiders for its gameplay. The shooting, made more high-stakes thanks to the thrill of protecting your gear, is a blast. But I’m also quite fond of how the game is handling its live-service nature, from rotating map challenges like Night Raids that make the world feel more lively, to launching its first community event. Right now players are actively contributing resources to collectively unlock its new map, Stella Montis which, at the time of writing, sits at under 10-percent unlocked.
It’s nice to see a community feel like a community and an event feel like, well, an event.
Promising new challenges and foes in Stella Montis, Embark Studios has also released a set of patch notes detailing a few minor but meaningful changes to the game’s meta, with perhaps the most substantial being that Arc Motion Cores and Arc Circuitry can now be crafted with a level two Refiner, instead of level three.
Here’s the list of changes as per the official patch notes:
There are also a handful of necessary bug fixes, though one of those fixes makes the damn Fireball, those rolly bastards who’ll light you up with flames in various interior structures, more annoying. No longer will they “get stuck on security gates,” and instead they’ll just come right up to you for some on-demand BBQ.
Additionally, Security Lockers will now deal out less lucrative loot, though snagging that Skill will still be worth it.
The patch notes also detail some fixes to “character movement latency,” which should in theory improve the dreaded “desync” issues some players are reporting running into. The patch also “reduced the delay between shooting at Arc and seeing impact effects on the target” so gunplay might feel a touch snappier. I’ll report back after I get a few rounds in. There’s a smattering of other improvements you can read about in the official patch notes here.
